The Army acknowledged the accomplishments of the most secret commando
unit of the Vietnam War on Wednesday.

Staff
photo by Cindy Burnham

Retired
Maj. John L. Plaster holds a coin minted for the SOG ceremony.

The Presidential Unit Citation went to the group 29 years after it went
out of business and three years after CNN broadcast a bogus report saying
it used nerve gas on defectors. The network later retracted its story.

The unit was called the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam Studies and
Observation Group, or SOG.

After the ceremony, some of the veterans sarcastically thanked CNN for
broadcasting the nerve gas report in 1998.

‘‘I think that (the award) is long overdue, and I think that we
have to give some thanks to CNN because the fiasco that they produced
caused an investigation by the Department of Defense and others that found
that we were not only not war criminals but, in fact, we had a collection
of heroes that was not equaled,’’ John K. Singlaub said after the
ceremony.

Singlaub, who is 79 years old and a retired major general, lives in
Arlington, Va. He was chief of SOG from 1966 to 1968.

The Presidential Unit Citation is given to units that display gallantry
that set them apart from other units. The unit award is equal to the
individual award of the Distinguished Service Cross, the U.S. military’s
second-highest award for valor.

Hundreds of people attended the award ceremony in the plaza on Ardennes
Street on Fort Bragg. A statue of SOG veteran Col. Bull Simons stands in
the plaza.

Retired Maj. John L. Plaster was the first person to receive a special
commemorative coin minted for the occasion. He wrote a book about SOG and
worked for recognition of the unit.

‘‘It’s a day that I think most of us thought would never
happen,’’ Plaster said after the ceremony. ‘‘Everything we were
doing in the old days was denied. We accepted that. That’s part of the
cost of doing classified, black operations. Even our existence was denied.
There were a great many young men that came home that could never quite
tell their families, their friends what they did.’’

Plaster is from Iron River, Wis. He is 52.

SOG members operated deep behind enemy lines in Vietnam, Cambodia and
Laos. They conducted operations on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the North
Vietnamese supply line through the countries that border South Vietnam.

The host for the ceremony was Lt. Gen. Doug Brown, commander of U.S.
Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg.

Staff
photo by Cindy Burnham

Lt.
Gen. Doug Brown, commanding general, U.S. Army Special Operation
Command, stands with South Vietnamese veterans after Wednesday's
ceremony.

SOG members had ‘‘the guile and the audacity to take the war where
the enemy lives, to get at his sanctuary, to make him react, to take away
his safe and secure environment, give him those chills as he is walking
down that long jungle trail at night, not knowing if around the corner
members of SOG are waiting,’’ Brown said. ‘‘It doesn’t take
many. It doesn’t take often, but it takes men of steel, willing to take
risks, willing to make the trip.’’

The missions included sabotage, calling in B-52 bomber strikes, search
and rescue of downed pilots in the jungle and destruction and recovery of
sensitive equipment.

The operations tied down thousands of members of the North Vietnamese
Army searching for SOG, Brown said.

At its peak, SOG had about 2,000 members. An estimated 7,800 men served
in SOG over its eight-year existence. Some SOG veterans, such as Dick
Meadows, Eldon Bargewell and Walt Shumate, became founders and leaders of
Delta Force, the Army’s counterterrorism and hostage- rescue unit
founded in 1977.

SOG members received more than 2,000 individual awards for heroism,
including 10 Medals of Honor, twice as many as the 82nd Airborne Division
received in both world wars.

‘‘Most of our missions were classified for so long that nobody got
much recognition,’’ Grove said.

Among veterans at the ceremony were 10 South Vietnamese commandos who
were sent on missions to North Vietnam, where they spent 20 years in
prison. The Vietnamese, who wore green berets to the ceremony, live in
Georgia.

FORT BRAGG, N.C. (April 4, 2001 9:19 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com)
- Twenty-nine years after it disbanded, a once-secret Special Operations
unit credited with diverting the enemy and rescuing pilots during the
Vietnam War received official recognition with a presidential citation
Wednesday.

Veterans of the Studies and Observation Group, including some active
duty soldiers, were given ribbons and special coins at a ceremony here. A
small group of beret-clad Vietnamese stood alongside veterans wearing
special black jackets and green berets.

"It's a day that most of us thought would never happen," said
John Plaster of Iron River, Wis., a retired Army major. "That's part
of the price of doing clandestine operations. Our existence was officially
denied."

The unit, made up of Army, Navy and Marine personnel, operated from
1964 until 1972. It had 2,000 U.S. personnel and 8,000 indigenous
mercenaries assigned to it at its peak.

Its mission was to divert North Vietnam's army, send back intelligence
information, assess bombing sites and results for U.S. planes, and rescue
downed U.S. pilots.

Eighteen SOG teams - usually eight men each - disappeared without a
trace or were killed in battle. None was returned after the war as
prisoners.

About the time that unit files were declassified, it was accused in a
1998 joint CNN-Time story of using sarin gas in Laos during Operation
Tailwind, a mission to find defectors. Two U.S. defectors were supposedly
killed in the attack, the report said.

The story was retracted when the allegations could not be
substantiated. Time and CNN, both owned by Time Warner, apologized for the
story.

Plaster said the presidential citation was "the ultimate
vindication."